Simplifying My Life - Daily Devotions

As I shared in this post, my theme word for 2011 is "Simplify" - to make everything in our lives and home more simple or, not so stressful.  I often tend to be an "over-achiever" not so much that I always go the extra mile on everything but more that I  plan way more than I can ever accomplish and put too many things into one day.  Even as I planned to Simplify my life this year, I found that everything I wanted to do to Simplify was causing me stress LOL  So, I decided to just tackle one little area at a time but as I work on any given area, I'm always looking at it saying "does this simplify?" 

I digress, the purpose of this post really, was to share how I am Simplifying my devotional plan for the next three month commitment with Good Morning Girls.

In September 2010, I joined up with several other women to form a Good Morning Girls group which is designed for accountability through the Women Living Well website.  It was great getting to know these new friends and I'm looking forward to another session starting soon.  When I wrote about it at that time, I shared what I was going to be doing for my devotions which included, at the time, five different things.  It changed slightly during the 3 month session as I switched out one devotional book because it had no substance and I didn't use the prayer journal, because it is actually is a very detailed devotion book in itself.  Instead I made a prayer journal in the back of my devotional journal.  I've thought alot about what I want to do this time around and decided to pick my focus.  When I really thought about it, I realized that my main focus needs to be reading through the Bible in a year.  I am a little behind due to missing quite a few days between Thanksgiving and Christmas (or should I say now :-) ) and need to catch back up.  So, the main item I will be doing for my daily devotions will be reading 3 days worth of daily Bible Reading for this goal.  I plan to read the current days reading and than go back to where I stopped and read 2 days worth until I'm caught up.  One of the nice things about the plan I use is that it only has you read for 25 days leaving the last 5 days of the month for me to catch up even more.  If you would like to see the program just click here. 

To challenge myself this year, I've decided to try a Scripture Memory challenge to learn 24 verses over the course of the next year.  I found this challenge at Living Proof Ministries and liked the Simplicity of it.  I have chosen a passage to learn so I will actually end up learning more than 24 verses if I learn the whole thing.  I'm excited about this little challenge. 

And the one final thing I will be working on is a Study in James being led by the Good Morning Girls "leaders".  It is a 14 week study through the book of James and is really pretty Simple to follow.  I feel like I need this specific study to give me something to really study.  In reading through the Bible in a Year, I find that is what I'm doing, reading.  In order to complete it, I don't really have the time to study everything I read. 

So yes, it took a lot to write it, but I have simplified my plan to these three things:
1) Daily Bible Reading
2) Scripture memory
3) Bible Study. 

So what are you doing this year for your Bible Study? If you are interested in more info on the James study just click here